Bay 12 Games Forum

I was thinking it would be fun (but not too much !!FUN!!) to embark on the edge of a reanimating ocean.  Then I could throw things into it to create moderately challenging enemies, but not be overrun by my refuse pile or have all my dwarves turn into husks, etc (as the main fort will be outside the evil ocean biome).

A couple of questions:
(1) Do evil reanimating ocean biomes exist?

(2) Any tips on creating a map which has them?  I know that running advanced worldgen with # of large evil regions >0 pretty much guarantees an evil ocean. 

(3) When embarking, it appears that the evil ocean has multiple biome regions within it (accessible by pressing F1, F2, etc).  Are these really distinct biomes, each with a chance to be reanimating that should be tested seperately, or once I find the ocean is not reanimating should I gen a new world?

(4) Suggestions for how to test if a biome is reanimating?  I tried just dumping body parts (hair, nervous tissue) and whole corpses on the beach next to the ocean (which is presumably still in the evil biome as it rains blood) but nothing has moved so far in either of the evil biomes on my map.

(5) Will corpses thrown in the water than reanimate be able to walk/swim back to land to attack my fort, or should I make sure to dump them on the beach or a platform?  Body parts thrown in the water in the arena seemed to drown eventually, which I found odd as I would assume they don't need to breathe.

I did some large-scale testing of melee weapons, because I wanted to know what would be the most effective thing to arm my dwarves with.  There are some results posted on the wiki, but I'm not sure how old they are, and Toady fixed several bugs relevant to melee combat so even 34.11 results might not be accurate any more.  Short answer - all weapons besides maces are pretty similar - maces are crap (I think that's pretty well known).

In this test I wanted to see what would be most effective against invaders.  I made a custom arena with an array of 1x3 cells across the whole map.  I then placed goblins in each of the cells, like so
-----
|12+|
-----where 1 and 2 are the goblins on sides 1 and 2.  For all tests, goblins were armored with iron helm, iron chain mail shirt, leather leggings, and leather shoes and iron shields.  In other words, fairly typical for what invaders wear - perhaps on the high end.  I then added 1152 goblins for each side, armed as described, using macros which I will post shortly.  All goblins were competent in fighter, axeman, swordsman, spearman, hammerman, maceman, dodger, armor user, and shield user. 

Edit: I forgot to mention that I used a script to count the first 1000 kills in each test, and tabulate how many were for each side.  I stopped at 1000, as if you wait long enough almost all the test subjects on both sides will die from bleeding and infection, so you have to stop somewhere.  I then ran most of the tests twice, switching which weapons was side 1 and side 2, in case there was any bias between sides (it appears that side 2 gets to strike first, and has a slight advantage), and added the scores together.

The results are as follows:

For steel weapons:

axe	836	sword	1164
axe	789	spear	1211
axe	1305	mace	695
axe	943	hammer	1057
sword	944	spear	1056
sword	1422	mace	578
sword	1069	hammer	931
spear	1368	mace	632
spear	1137	hammer	863
mace	728	hammer	1272

In older versions, heavier metals made better blunt weapons.  However, Toady fixed some errors which I think were largely responsible for this.  Any difference between silver and steel blunt weapons is small enough that it is not statistically significant.

silver mace	1019	steel mace	981
silver hammer	991	steel hammer	1009

However, adamantine is light enough that it is significantly worse for blunt weapons, and of course it is a bit better for edged weapons.  I suspect that there is something like a cutoff for the maximum speed a weapon can travel at (this is what happens for projectiles) such that very light things like adamantine (and possibly wood) end up with lower momentum, but all standard metals are the same.  This is purely speculation though.

adamantine axe	534	steel axe	466
adamantine sword	536	steel sword	464
adamantine spear	509	steel spear	491
adamantine mace	214	steel mace	786
adamantine hammer	159	steel hammer	841

In summary, spears appear to be the best melee weapons, followed by swords, warhammers, axes, and finally maces.  The differences between the good weapons are quite small, and may not even be significant in all cases.  These results are for goblins armed as "typical" invaders, and it is possible different weapons could be better against other opponents.

My next step will be to test against larger creatures, such as elephants, dragons, and (if I can figure out how to get the raws) maybe clowns.  Given that spears came out on top against goblins, and they have the highest penetration depth, I expect that they will also prove the most effective against larger creatures, meaning they may be the best overall choice for your military.  However I cannot stress enough that the difference between all weapons (except maces) are quite small, so you should not take these results to indicate that other weapons are bad.

For comparison, I ran anther test where the skills of one set of goblins were Great and the other unskilled, and both sides had silver hammers.  The result was 999 to 1.  Skills far outweigh the small difference between weapons, as the standard weapons are actually balanced quite well.

I realized that since you can now give people things via the conversation menu, it is now possible to train by giving people training weapons and "sparring" with them.  It is also possible to give your companions training weapons.  The most reliable way to do this is to first trade them useless stuff (gems, socks, etc - anything works so long as it's not a container) for their weapon and pouch (and any other containers they might have).  Then give them a training weapon.  Having no where to put it, they will hold it in their hand, and will use it. 

You can also take away the weapons and containers via wrestling, but then you have to get them to agree to end combat before giving them a training weapon.  I think you may be able to get around this by starting a conversation, and then wrestling them, and then continuing to the "exchange items" option, but this might be a bug in the conversation interface.

I verified that this works a few different ways.  I found a camp of wrestlers, stole their pouches, and then gave them training weapons and let them hit me for a long time.  I also traded with all my companions to give them training weapons and then attacked a dwarf fortress I created, also all armed with training weapons.  Everyone happily (and mostly harmlessly) beat on one another for quite some time.  You do have to watch out for occasional injuries if people decide to punch/bite/scratch instead of using their weapons.  You can prevent all injury to yourself (except maybe facial features?) by wearing armor, but I don't believe there is a way to equip armor on your companions and sparring partners without using dfhack (and the adv-bodyswap command doesn't seem to be working in 40.08-r2, but I might not have used it right).  The biggest problem was my companions kept running off - possibly chasing after one of the dwarves who decided to run away after he was injured?  You also have to watch that you (and your partners) don't get too tired, and take breaks when this happens (i.e. run away and come back later).  The first guy I tried this on literally beat on me until he fell over from exhaustion, and then I left and came back and he did it again.

Not that there aren't enough ways to train your adventurer, but this one seems slightly less exploity than some. 

[Edit - DISCLAIMER - it does not actually appear that there is any significant difference in the power of ranged weapons in 40.XX vs 34.11.  I had heard rumors that they were, but so far all tests show them to be equal.  If you have evidence of differences, I am VERY interested]

I heard some rumors that ranged weapons are even more deadly in this version than the last, so I decided to do some testing, following the methods outlined in this thread  Here are some initial results, and I will try to update with more details as I complete more testing.

1) Initial results suggest there is no change the the protection armor offers against projectiles, as outlined on the wiki here.  For vanilla DF, this is somewhat irrelevant as plate armor offers absolutely no protection, but by adjusting the raws for [SHOOT_FORCE] of crossbows I found that the force required to pierce adamantium armor with copper bolts is unchanged since 34.11:
[Edit - in vanilla DF SHOOT_FORCE is 1000, which is over 10 times what can be blocked by even adamantine armor.  The crazily high forces combined with tiny contact area render plate armor useless against projectiles in both 34.11 and 40.03]

As an aside, this deflection vs. force curve has an interesting kink in it.  These results are for shooting at custom creatures with only an upper and lower body:
and for some reason deflections occur off the upper body at a higher force than the lower body, as illustrated by repeating the experiment with the breastplate removed and the blobs wearing only greaves:
I thought maybe this was because greaves have different layer thickness than breastplates, so I copied all the properies of breastplates to greaves and repeated, but obtained the same result (the "uniform" dataset), so I am puzzled as to what is causing the difference.  Anyhow, back to the main point.

2) The rate of fire for crossbows and bows seems to be much higher in this version than the last one.  As far as I can tell, ranged weapons fire as the same speed as melee attacks in 40.03, while they were much slower in 34.11.  I have not quantified this yet, but significantly increasing the rate of fire definitely would make ranged weapons (even more) deadly.
[Edit - my initial testing does NOT show a significant difference in fire rate between 40.03 and 34.11.  It appears that melee attacks are roughly twice as fast as ranged attacks in both versions, but this is very hard to quantify as melee attacks by the AI are quite variable.  In any case, it's not a major difference].

3)  Ranged weapons can now completely destroy body parts using the pulping mechanics (at least I assume this is what's going on).  In my tests, I found that body parts could be "mostly cut away" or "cloven asunder", which both are fatal to Arena Blobs.  This caused the majority of Blob targets to be killed in tests where deflection was not 100%, while no blobs were killed at any forces tested (up to F=128) in 34.11.  It is not clear how this would impact the deadliness of bolts under vanilla conditions, as I believe these mechanics require the same part to be stuck multiple times, and most living creatures will give in to pain/bleed to death before a single body part is struck repeatedly.  However maybe at high force a single bolt hit can now cleave body parts?  This will be my next line of investigation.

Anyhow, I would like to do a lot more testing of this, but my time is somewhat limited as I have a 1 month old baby (who currently wants to be fed).  If anyone else is interested in pursuing this, I have a library of perl scripts and DF macros that I use for running automated large scale testing in the arena, which I would be happy to share.  They are set up to run on Linux, but it should be relatively easy to convert them to Windows if needed.

The !!SCIENCE!! in this thread suggests that the primary advantage of adamantine projectiles over steel is that adamantine has higher [SHEAR_YIELD] and [SHEAR_FRACTURE].  This means that edged attacks by adamantine bolts/arrows can't be stopped at all by any armor which doesn't have equally high [SHEAR_YIELD] or [SHEAR_FRACTURE] (meaning more adamantine, and possibly slade).

Now, if we assume that melee edged attacks behave roughly the same (which circumstantial evidence supports, but is by no means proven) this raises the question of whether its worth making adamantine weapons in fort mode.  Nothing that dwarves will fight (other than berserk dwarves or perhaps a steel titan) will have steel armor, meaning that steel edged weapons should go right through all goblin, human, and certainly elven armor.  I've used a single axelord wielding a steel axe to defeat entire goblin sieges, which seems to support this.  My logs from my fort showed no cases where a hack with a steel axe was deflected.  It is possible that attacks are "slowed down" without being deflected, but this definitely does not occur for steel bolts fired at non-steel armor, which result in death just as quickly as against targets wearing no armor at all. 

If it is really true that steel cuts through non-steel armor just as well as adamantine, than it might actually be *better* than adamantine for melee weapons, as it is more massive and might have more momentum (depending on how the velocity of a melee attack is calculated).  We definitely found that having more massive bolts caused more damage, but that is partly due to some funny rounding in calculations of bolt velocity. 

Anyway, I am curious if anyone has any insights into this.  I am considering setting up some arena tests of 1 vs. 1 dwarves wearing iron armor, armed with either steel or adamantine axes.  If my conjecture is correct, the result should either be a draw or favor the steel axes.  Then my next question would be what a good test of something "hard" that dwarves might face in fortress mode would be?   I could put dwarves against dragons of course, or possibly clowns (may not be available in the arena?).  I think the problems that dwarves have scoring hits on large targets are more issues with penetration depth than weapon sharpness though.

I think it might be nice if upon the death/capture of your adventurer, you could be given the option to transfer control to one of your followers.  In particular, I think this might make a lot more sense in the context of the "Hero" role updates Toady is planning to work on next.  If your followers have more of a personality, and different levels of loyalty to you, then perhaps you could only be allowed to transfer to a follower who is extremely loyal, as a kind of reward for making them happy.  This also could be very interesting in the context of of justice, as if you are captured then you could take control of your followers and have them mount a rescue or raise your ransom.  I feel like if your little group is going to become an entity and be given a name, then maybe it should be able to persist even without it's leader.

Has anyone had any luck finding ranged ammo (bolts or arrows) in shops?  I've looked in a few bowyer's shows and weaponsmith's shops and couldn't find any.  Is this also bugged like the armor shops, or am I looking in the wrong place? 

Also, in previous versions I thought the food shops sold booze as well.  Now that I have to drink, it would be more satisfying to have something better to drink than water, but all I can find in food shops is...food.  Or are adventurers supposed to only drink water (and lots of blood  )?  Maybe this was intentionally removed and booze will later be sold in taverns?